Q: Help! I told my boss to turn on her iCloud backup since she never syncs her iPhone 4 to her computer. Well, she turned it on and now all her calendar events are gone on her iPhone. I’ve been working on it for a couple of hours now and I can’t figure out where they have gone. I have already changed the syncing of events to all events and they didn’t come back. When I look at my own iPhone, in my calendars, I have a calendar labeled “My iPhone Calendar”. On her phone, there are only iCloud calendars. Is there a setting somewhere to turn on her iPhone calendar? Of course she had everything on her calendar and did not back up regularly to her computer so I can’t retrieve it that way.

- Donna

A: Ordinarily, when enabling iCloud Calendar any existing Calendar entries should be automatically uploaded to the iCloud Calendar, and the local “on your iPhone” calendar is essentially disabled. If the iCloud Calendar is empty, this normally just happens transparently, with local calendars being moved to iCloud.

If the iCloud Calendar and local calendars both contain appointments, you will receive a prompt when enabling iCloud Calendar noting that the two will be merged, with your local Calendars essentially becoming part of the iCloud Calendars.

In either case, you should see the old local calendars appear in the iCloud Calendar section. You’ll want to double-check to ensure that all of the iCloud calendars are in fact enabled in the Calendars app. A quick way to do this is to tap the “Hide All Calendars” button at the top of the calendar listing, changing it to “Show All Calendars” which you can tap again to ensure that all calendars are selected and being displayed.

Even if all of the calendars are being displayed, toggling them off and back on can sometimes refresh the view. You can also try rebooting her iPhone to see if that makes a difference.

It may also be worth logging into her account at iCloud.com and seeing if any calendar entries are showing up there. This will help you determine if they have at least been uploaded to iCloud and perhaps it’s merely her iPhone that’s not displaying them.

If for some reason the local calendars weren’t properly transferred to or merged with iCloud, you can also try simply toggling the iCloud Calendars option back OFF under Settings, iCloud.

You’ll see a prompt about deleting the iCloud Calendars; go ahead and choose this option since the alternative is to copy the (blank) iCloud Calendars back over the local copy, which you don’t want to risk doing. The “Delete” option does not remove any data from iCloud—only the local device section.

Once you’ve toggled off iCloud Calendars, the Calendars app should again show the “On my iPhone” calendars, which hopefully will still contain the original calendar data from before iCloud was switched on.

Unfortunately, if you still aren’t seeing any calendar data even after following the above steps, you may be out of luck if your boss only stored her calendar on her iOS device and hasn’t synced or backed it up anywhere else. If you have made a successful iCloud backup already, you could try restoring the iCloud backup as a last-ditch effort, since the calendars might have been backed up during the initial backup prior to whatever process wiped them out, but that’s actually a long shot and may not be worth the time as you basically have to restore the iPhone to factory settings and restore the backup as part of the initial iOS setup process.